Governing Households: Free African Americans and the Construction of Race in Colonial North Carolina

Charlotte A. Haller, Drake University

This paper explores the ways that an emerging vision of race bumped up against older structures of household authority in the late colonial period. Centering upon the free black population of North Carolina, this paper argues that the types and degrees of power and freedom and delineated within households prevented a simple opposition between "white" and "black" from shaping social relations. In pre-Revolutiionary North Carolina, ideas about racial inferiority, attentiveness to skin color, and determinants of the status of "free negroes, mulattoes, and all persons of mixed blood" largely existed in deference to the graduations of status and hierarchy of patriarchal households. Rather than race, the household remained the dominant institiution of social and legal authority in eighteenth-centruy North Carolina and it was primarily in terms of their relations to households, rather than to races, that individuals were identified.

At the Newbery Library, April 26, 2001, 3:30-5:30pm

Charlotte Haller will present a work in progress which we will pre-circulate to those who plan to attend the session. To request a copy of the seminar paper, email Rebekah Holmes at scholl@newberry.org or call(312) 255-3524. Paper will be distributed by e-mail unless otherwise requested.

Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.